I spend a lot of time fighting C strings--those character strings that have a null (CHAR(0) or ''C) following the useful part. Sometimes a null is needed and my string doesn't have it, either because of my carelessness or because of coded logic that was supposed to put it there and failed. Other times the null is there by accident and it shouldn't be. Debugging is harder than it should be because of the display format used by Visual Studio on watched variables: the nulls do not appear. For example, a CHARACTER(8) string of 'abcd'C appears as 'abcd ', leaving me to my own methods to determine what may or may not be hiding in those last four characters.
How about displaying the string as 'abcd^ ', 'abcd^^^^', 'abcd####', etc. where ^ indicates a null and # indicates a blank, as the case may be? Obviously these may not be the best characters to use since they may have been used intentionally, but there should be some simple reasonable way around this.
My suggestion would be something similar to the option to toggle the display of numeric variables in either decimal or hex--i.e, a toggle to display character values in either "normal" or "special codes" where '^' represents a null, '#' represents a blank, and so on.
At least for me, this would save hours of debug time.